ICE Director John Morton Essentially Thanks Hate Group for “Sharing Concerns” About Secure Communities

This story came to our attention after seeing the following meme shared by our friends at Cuéntame:

We did a little more digging and came cross this post: LETTER FROM ICE DIRECTOR JOHN MORTON TO HATE GROUP, FAIR, STIRS CONTROVERSY. Here is what the post from the National Day Laborer Organizing Network (NDLON) had to say:

As ICE faces questions about how it will react to patterns of discrimination and the likelihood of increasing racial profiling under SB1070, a letter from director John Morton to the Federation for American Immigration Reform, an organization on the Anti-Defamation League's list of hate groups, which states that ICE "shares their concerns" about positive legislation in Cook County, Illinois and thanks them for their support is stirring further controversy in Washington and in states that are looking for ways to protect residents from discrimination and negative consequences of police/ICE collaboration.

Besides being called a hate group by the Anti-Defamation League, FAIR has also been called out by the Southern Poverty Law Center. This is what SPLC has to say about FAIR and founder John Tanton: "The Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) is a group with one mission: to severely limit immigration into the United States. Although FAIR maintains a veneer of legitimacy that has allowed its principals to testify in Congress and lobby the federal government, this veneer hides much ugliness. FAIR leaders have ties to white supremacist groups and eugenicists and have made many racist statements. Its advertisements have been rejected because of racist content. FAIR’s founder, John Tanton, has expressed his wish that America remain a majority-white population: a goal to be achieved, presumably, by limiting the number of nonwhites who enter the country. One of the group’s main goals is upending the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which ended a decades-long, racist quota system that limited immigration mostly to northern Europeans. FAIR President Dan Stein has called the Act a 'mistake.'"

NDLON also published the full letter Morton sent to FAIR and annotated it:

John Morton's Sympathy Letter to Hate Group

Chris Newman, Legal Director of the NDLON, said the following about the Morton letter: "The outrageous, offensive, and inaccurate communication to a known hate group reveals the desperate lengths the ICE Director will now travel to defend his misguided Secure Communities and 'ICE hold' policy. The Department of Justice report on Alamance County is yet another example of the calamity caused by local Sheriffs' enforcement of immigration law. What is deemed unjust to the DOJ is apparently deemed desirable to ICE. We used to believe that ICE was simply blind to the civil rights violations it was causing, but now there is reason to believe the agency's director has been willfully ignorant. ICE is a rogue agency, and we call on the White House to take swift action to save the administration from further embarrassment."